How do I escape special characters like . / or

vroom has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:

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Re: How do I escape special characters like . / or in a regular expression? by vroom (His Eminence) on Jan 21, 2000 at 00:48 UTC
Precede the special characters with \ ie: `$filename=~/.*\.txt$/ # matches anything ending with .txt;` [download]	[reply] [d/l]
Re: How do I escape special characters like . / or in a regular expression? by arhuman (Vicar) on Jan 23, 2001 at 14:06 UTC
use quotemeta.	[reply]
Re: How do I escape special characters like . / or in a regular expression? by Codmate (Novice) on Aug 29, 2001 at 16:07 UTC
It is possible to use another character (other than "/") to make a regex. A hash symbol can be used for example: `$changeme = "/this/url/would/be/a/nightmare/in/regex/"; $changeme =~ s#would/be#is/not#;` [download] You can also escape all special characters in a regex with "\Q" and "\E" like this: `$changeme = "/this/url/wold/b^e/a/nightmare/in/regex/"; $changeme =~ s/\Qwold/b^e\E/\Qis/not\E/;` [download]	[reply] [d/l] [select]
Re: How do I escape special characters like . / or in a regular expression? by ariels (Curate) on Nov 29, 2000 at 17:39 UTC
Use the `quotemeta` function. Or, inside a "double-quotish context" (such as a regexp), you may use `\Q...\E` to get "`...`" literally.	[reply]